As most of you probably read or heard on the news, as a response to the catastrophe in Haiti, a group of volunteers with skills in the IT area, communications, GIS, emergency response, emergency management, etc, got together and created the CrisisCamp. Several meetings were held in a few cities around the country and the rest of world, where these IT professionals got together, with no agenda whatsoever, except the desire to brainstorm and act on ways to use their skills to improve technology and practice for humanitarian crisis management and disaster relief.I think this was a great innitiative, and I whish I was living close to one of the cities where these meetings were held, in order to participate as well.As a community of volunteers, we are in a unique position to put our minds together in coming up with ways to do something similiar. We know how strong the church is in it's capacity to provide humanitarian relief in these disaster scenarios, and in situation such as Haiti, we also have teams of voluntareers doing search and rescue, medical teams setting up hospitals in the church facilities that are still standing, etc., etc. I wonder if these teams could use our help in coming up with tools to help them in their work?I think that it would be a great use of our time, and very much in line with the mission of the church, to get together with the people that head these teams of volunteers, and come up with projects that we could start working on in times of "peace", that could be deployed with these teams, when the need arises in order to provide them with the tools they need on the ground. Then we could package these tools and make them available as a kind of startup IT kit for humanitarian/catastrophy missions.

I would like to hear your thoughts about this subject, and if anyone is interested, I would like to start discussing these ideas more in depth and turn it into an actionable project for this community.

I am interested in helping out, however, I am only a user of IT systems. I am heavily involved in emergency response and contingency exercises and have experience in managing real world disasters and accidents. I am familiar with NIMS (National Incident Management System) and understand command and control during incident response.With my experience I can help by providing advice and beta test anything that you might come up with.